A Modern Approach to Searching for Late-time X-Ray Emission in Type Ib/c Supernovae

I present the progress both scientific and infrastructural that I have made while working on this search for late-time circumstellar interaction in type Ib/c supernovae. We see no evidence of Hydrogen in type Ib/c supernovae at the time of explosion, despite hydrogen being the most abundant element in stars. If the hydrogen were cast off, either in a stellar wind or through impulsive ejections of material, we expect that after some time, the shock waves produced by the supernova catch up to this hydrogen ejecta, leading to interaction that can produce X-rays, as well as Hα emission. We search the Chandra X-Ray Observatory for observations which serendipitously have these supernovae within the field of view of the telescope. For those that do, we use CIAO to extract spectra and response files. We use Sherpa to fit an absorbed thermal bremsstrahlung model to measure or place limits on the X-ray flux from the site of the supernova. We have also conducted several observing runs at McDonald Observatory, using DIAFI Hα filters on the Harlan J. Smith Telescope to complement our X-Ray search. We have also been able to trim down the time it takes to put Chandra observations through our analysis pipeline by automating many steps. Finally, we have updated and modernized our automation scripts to use Python within Jupyter notebooks in order to create the most accessible version of this research project for its next student.